Back Online

For the moment, at least, I'm back online. Turns out the problem with the DSL was...my fault! But of course it was! This is Germany and the customer is always wrong.

The DSL modem had died. The guy I talked to suggested I go buy another one. I asked him why I wouldn't get another one from Telekom. "Hey," he said, in that patented friendly Telekom manner, "you've had this one since 2001."

So today I went to a T-Punkt, and, after waiting about 40 minutes in line, was sold another one for a mere €89.99! There goes the food budget for the forseeable future, but at least it works.

And, last night as I was thinking about this, I remembered my very first contact with Deutsche Telekom and thought I should share it with you nice folks.

When I first got here, I lived in a succession of apartments (well, two) where the phone bill was automatically taken out of the subletter's bank account and I paid them back. But a sometime business associate was moving to Hong Kong and wanted me to take over his apartment, which was huge, so I happily did it. One thing, though: he had to put all the utilities in my name, everything but the lease. There was one problem: they'd had their telephone turned off a few weeks earlier, and this was a time when if you were lucky, it was an eight-week wait for a number, since for some reason there was a shortage of them.

So his wife ran down the street to one of the storefronts Telekom used to have all over the place, and she talked to the lady there, who looked in the computer and said "You're lucky: the number hasn't been reassigned, and we can turn the phone on for the new tenant." So they started setting me up with the new account and old number, the wife explaining that my German was very bad, and I'd authorized her to do this (I think I'd already signed something that said so). "Ward," said the Telekom lady. "Is he English?" "No," the other woman said, "he's American." The Telekom lady stopped filling out the form. "Is he a black man?" she asked. "Oh, no," she was assured. "Good," said Ms. Telekom, starting to rubber-stamp stuff on the papers. "Black people don't pay their bills."

And I wish I didn't have to end this story by saying that when this guy's wife told me of this encounter, she finished by saying "They don't, you know." But she did.

Anyway, lots of other stuff, much more interesting than my own travails here, to report, so I think this blog's going to get active again in the next few days, as we play Hide the Synagogue and report on Berliners' mental health. Now to catch up on the e-mails.

Another Catastrophe

So while I wait for Telekom to turn the DSL back on, due to happen today, but as of 2 pm not happening (and their free number for DSL service questions doesn't work today, which is encouraging), I've just had another horrifying catastrophe.

Yesterday I turned on the big computer in my living room, and after it did its thing and I didn't play with it because the DSL was still off, it went to sleep, making some odd noises as it did so. When I tried to reawaken it about an hour later, I got a gray screen. Further investigation turned up the fact that the machine couldn't find the hard disc. This may not be the end of everything on the computer (backup? what's backup?), but the fact is that I don't have the money to have it diagnosed, let alone fixed.

At the very least, it's going to be several weeks before I can do this, so right now what I would like is for any of you who read this and regularly correspond with me to please just drop me a pro-forma e-mail ("Hi, Ed," or whatever) to whatever address you're using (unless it's Compuserve: that went away ages ago) so I can re-build the old address book. I have plenty of addresses, but I think it'd be better to be safe.

I should be more shocked and depressed than I am, but it occurred to me, thinking about this as I looked at the poor old G4 tower sitting in the bright box it had been delivered in about six years ago, that I was never a computer user before I moved here, for various good reasons (although I probably would have changed in due time) but that the discovery of e-mail changed my life: I might have been thousands of miles away from my friends and business contacts, but suddenly Compuserve put them all in my lap. So, after moving here in August '93, a friend sold me his old PowerBook 160 (hey, trackballs! Remember them?) and the SXSW crew brought it over here when they visited MIDEM in January of '94. Been hooked ever since.

And, although a great deal of my older writing is backed up (I found a January '04 backup without really looking yesterday, and there may be a newer one somewhere), all the e-mail, photos, games, all the passwords for various websites and functions (like the links to Powells and Barnes and Nobel I post here), basically all my life since 1994 is contained in that silent, comatose block of plastic waiting until I can afford to take it to the doctor.

In other words, it's like some sort of period was placed at the end of a sentence. If there were ever a metaphorical event dealing with the necessity for me to get the hell out of here, boy, this is it.

Still lack the money and so on, and yeah, I'm going to have to get this at least diagnosed, and fixed if at all possible, but this metaphor may well be the reason I'm not rigid with grief and depression about this. It's like the cosmos went and reinforced something I already knew.

Of course, if someone waved a magic wand over it tomorrow and made it work again, that'd be a lot more satisfactory. But that's not gonna happen. If there's one thing this past decade has taught me, it's that there are no magic wands, very few miracles, and that luck is as likely to be bad as any other way. The solution is keeping on keeping on.

So, if Telekom ever gets the damn DSL back on, that's what me and the tiny laptop are going to do.

Telekom: The Larger Problem

I was in sort of a hurry yesterday, what with dealing with this internet cafe (from which I'm sorry to say I'm logging in again today), and realized this morning that there's more to this situation I'm currently in than just poor little me being shut off from my phone for a couple of weeks.

There's a societal problem at work here that's keeping Germany back, and it's something that may not be fixable. See, the main reason I got shut off is because I didn't do like most people here do and set up a regular draft from my bank account. This is because I never know how much I'll have in the bank at any given time. This is anathema to German institutions. You are supposed to have a regular income. It's virtually mandatory.

This is a huge problem, in my estimation. What it means, actually, is that you are to stay at a job until you retire, and that job is one where you work for someone else. That's assumed. And it's so ingrained that I once met a guy, an American, who was here working for a bank I won't name, teaching them how to communicate with their customers. It was a year-long project, something this guy is an expert at, which is why they hired him. So he moved to Berlin, set up his workshops, began training executives, and getting into life here. He also set up a bank account with the bank he was working for so they could pay him for his work, logically enough.

But then, one day, he got a note saying that they were terminating his account. The reason? He didn't have regularly-occurring deposits. The reason he didn't was that his contract with the bank for his work had him getting paid as he finished each segment of his training work, not on a weekly basis. So naturally he asked them what was going on. They told him that, yes, any bank in Germany (except one, which is where, coincidentally, I have my account) can terminate a bank account for this reason, and sorry, but that's what they were doing.

He realized, I think, that he wasn't going to get very far with what he was teaching, and left shortly thereafter.

My bank tried this, too, but fortunately I discovered they can't do it. There has to be one bank in the country which has to put up with this maddening individuality, and they drew the short straw. But the corollary to all of this is that if you can't work in a way where you get paid piecemeal, you're living in a society where you can't be self-employed. And what that means is that entrepreneurship of all sorts is discouraged by institutional fiat. Risk-taking is frowned on. I always bring up the quotation from a half-dozen years ago from the outgoing president of the European Bank, who said that Europe would never breed a Bill Gates because no young European would ever drop out of college because he thought he had a good idea.

Germans are already notoriously risk-averse, and I certainly discovered over the past decade how little they appreciate entrepreneurship, watching my own and others' attempts to start businesses get smothered by bureaucracy, unwillingness to invest in anything that wasn't a sure thing, and, in the case of a woman I know who tried to set up several businesses, the idea that women shouldn't go into business.

And another side of this attitude is that if all of your customers are good little sheep, they don't look at their bills as they get subtracted from their accounts. I like to know how much I'm being asked to pay, and why. In the past, Telekom has made mistakes on my bill, and they've behaved like they've seen old Lily Tomlin Ernestine the Operator skits and thought they were training films. I literally had one Telekom lady tell me that Telekom doesn't make mistakes. With a straight face. And people actually do submit to this.

Okay, this may be rambling. I have a hard time concentrating in this place, but I wanted to clarify some of what I wrote yesterday. I've got to find out when and if Telekom is going to turn me on, and I'm still not sure how that's going to happen, so that's today's chore. Time to pay another two Euros and head back to the house.

Meanwhile, if you've got a T-Mobile account there in the States, you might consider the company behind it. Bloated and arrogant, treating its customers in its home country as if it's still a monopoly with no one to answer to but itself. Deutsche Telekom.

Satankom Strikes Again

Bear with me. I have some nifty stuff to post, but I have to be at my desk, with access to various books and hyperlinks. Right now I'm at an internet cafe down the street, because I was a day late -- that's right, one day late with my phone payment.

This zero tolerance was also extended to two other people I know on the same day, and is, sadly, typical of Deutsche Telekom's relationship with its customers. Also, there's no negotiating with them: they turn you back on when they're good and ready.

There used to be a place, a storefront, where you could go pay your bills, but they don't do that any more. I guess there were too many irate customers coming in and threatening the workers. Wouldn't surprise me, at any rate. So I had to fill out a money transfer form, take it to the bank, and wait. That was Tuesday. Friday the thing finally went through, but of course there's no way Telekom works on Saturday, so I'm gambling they'll turn me on tomorrow. If not, it could be up to a week longer.

And, like I said, no way you can negotiate with them: I stand to lose €900 worth of work for a German government publication if I can't get back on this week, but this bit of information would make no impact whatever on them. They simply don't care what happens to their customers.

But I'll be back and posting again as soon as I can. And working overtime to get out of this horrible place.

April Crumbs

Boy, I feel like an idiot. Did I really think that Harald Juhnke's dropping dead would mean the end of the tabloids' long affair with him? I woke up the day after I wrote that post and walked to the bakery on the corner, and there were the ad boards for the newspapers, all competing to offer more coverage of the funeral than the next one. I saw one offering six pages of color photos of the funeral. Bet that was fun...

***

Much, including an essay by Mark Twain I've yet to read, has been made of the German language and its unbelievable complexity, but there are times when it just says something you can't say any other way. The best example I've run into recently was over the weekend, when my friend the dancer was over for dinner and, in the post-dinner conversation, she got curious about Arnold Schwarzenegger. "How," she asked, "could he have been elected governor of California after making all of those...those...Volksverdummerungfilme?" I was stopped dead in my tracks by the elegance of the word. Like all German compound nouns, it's just a bunch of words stuck together: Volk=people, Verdummerung=making stupid, and Filme=films. But the idea of filmsthatmakepeoplestupid is a great one, and although I don't know if my friend invented it or not, I sure hope she did. It's a great concept, anyway.

Another great German word, one which has made its way into English, since we never had a word for the thing, is Schadenfreude, literally "shameful happiness," but really just the nice feeling you get -- however briefly -- when something bad happens to someone you don't like. Thus, I should mention the demise -- or "hiatus," as they'd like us to believe -- of Tracks magazine, who I had a little run-in with a few months ago. As a friend, another veteran of the rock press for many decades, commented upon hearing the news, they were "run by rank in-crowders without a sense of adventure or taste," which pretty much sums it up. They were going to be the American version of Mojo, but I'm convinced that that's not the magazine to clone for the U.S., not any more. Nope, if you know someone with a whole lotta money (Tracks apparently burned through something like $5 million in no time), tell them to get and study Word, which is everything Mojo used to be, and more. Refinancing Tracks would just be throwing good money after bad, as they say.

***

The Pope came over yesterday to talk. No, not that Pope -- I don't let dead guys in the house. No, this was the Pope of Mope, a New Yorker and rock critic who moved here three years ago and has, I think, lived to regret it, although I also think he derives a certain energy out of being miserable. But he confirmed something I'd suspected, which is that the last great Berlin club of the golden era of techno, Tresor, is closing down this weekend. Once upon a time, caught there in the sort of no-man's-land between east and west, two clubs, Tresor and E-Werk, defined the Berlin sound and style. E-Werk was just what its name said, an old electrical generating station, mostly emptied out, with huge ceilings and a forbidding industrial vibe. Tresor, too, was what it advertised: the basement of an old department store, which had contained its vault. The building above Tresor had been pretty much bombed (although one story stood aboveground), and the basement (as you can see vaguely from the picture on their website) had a real mystery to it, stripped of anything which spoke of its previous tenants. The scenesters divided between E-Werk and Tresor partisans, but only Tresor was smart enough to really assemble a decent business infrastructure (the E-Werkers were the crowd that put on the Love Parade), starting a label, a clubwear line, and all of that.

Still, a lot of the folks who jammed the place back in '90 are 15 years older now, and the last time I was around Tresor, it looked like it had been invaded by what New Yorkers call Bridge and Tunnel People, the local variety being hicks who drive in from Brandenburg villages for a scary night out and plenty to drink. Yes, it appears Tresor will live on "in exile" somewhere over by Ostbahnhof, and sure, the label will continue, through Mute, to put out some of the harder-edged techno that's out there, but another institution from my early days here will fold on Sunday night, and I, of course, can't help but take that as yet another sign that it's time to move on and get out of here.

I'm working on it.

The Mess At Checkpoint Charlie

Yesterday, the BBC reported that the Museum am Checkpoint Charlie has to tear down the memorial they've erected on a plot of land there. I walked past it a few months ago but didn't stop, so I figured that today, with temperatures approaching 55 and a nice clear sky, would be a good time to take a walk down there and see what all the shouting is about.

I visited the Museum am Checkpoint Charlie on my first visit here in 1988, endeavoring to be a good tourist during the hours my then-girlfriend was working. It's a pretty remarkable place, which certainly does document a lot of escape attempts and has a lot of cool artifacts, but there was a creepy feeling about the place I couldn't really define. A collection box solicited donations for an unnamed "human rights organization" there, and my girlfriend gave a short laugh when I asked what this mysterious organization could be. "Probably the Ku Klux Klan," she said.

Probably not them, but certainly that far to the right. I'd still recommend the museum to interested visitors, but their agenda is something else entirely. According to the documentation at the site, it's owned by the Arbeitgemeinschaft 13. August e.V., or the 13th of August Working Group, which doesn't reveal much, and this non-profit (which is what the e.V. stands for) was founded by one Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt in 1962. Dr. Hildebrandt died on Jan. 9, 2004, and his widow re-erected a length of the Berlin Wall on a lot he'd leased from the Berliner Volksbank last year, then filled in both that lot and one opposite it on Friedrichstr. with wooden crosses, each of which represents someone killed, not, as the BBC reports, crossing the Wall, but attempting to escape from East Germany. Some of them go back to 1948, well before there was a Wall, in fact.

There are a lot of placards, very badly translated by someone who was proud enough to sign his name to them, decrying the fact that the city wants this private display of righteousness torn down. As for the monument itself, it's mostly fenced off, so it's impossible to read the captions on the vast majority of the crosses, which are made of simple creosoted wood and stand about 8 feet high. The placards express outrage that the city sold the lot to the Volksbank, instead of to the museum, although this part of town was and is a place where the city is desperately trying to establish a business district (with the minor inconvenience that very few businesses indeed want to relocate to Berlin). Widow Hildebrandt also mentions the expense she's gone to to lay wreaths at the site, although most of them seem to be at a makeshift memorial to her husband, and she also urges people who want to know why Dr. Hildebrandt's ashes haven't been interred to ask the "red, red Berlin Senate" why they haven't been. (One wonders where she's intending to plant the old guy).

There's also a guy there collecting signatures from unsuspecting tourists on a petition to allow the memorial to remain. He was busy barking at a bunch of Bavarians when I was there -- and naturally they'd be sympathetic -- but the only people who seemed to be doing really good business were the assembled Egyptians selling Soviet and East German crap: medals, watches, flags, hats, and of course matryoshka dolls, questionable amber, and painted wooden eggs. (How the Egyptians managed to get a monopoly on this would probably provide a fine primer on the workings of Berlin's criminal underground).

The city is alleging bad taste, but that's hardly going to wash with a lot of folks. They also allege that there are already two memorials to the Wall and its victims, and that's true, because one of them is near my house at Brunnenstr. and Ackerstr. There, a section of the Wall was purchased by the Berlin Museum (a museum of city history which I don't think has a building at the moment, having given up their old one to the Jewish Museum), and restored, poorly, then bookended with slabs of brushed stainless steel. I once took American artist Richard Posner there, since he specializes in political statements in public spaces and he almost had an apoplectic fit over how much of an opportunity the creators of this empty genture had wasted. Furthermore, the entire neighborhood where this thing was erected was outraged by the inscription Helmut Kohl's right-wing government had put on it, which stated it was a memorial to the division of the city and the "victims of the Communist reign of violence." For the longest while, police were unobtrusively stationed around the memorial because people kept defacing the inscription. As for the stretch of Wall itself, it's been treated by a graffiti-proof chemical, although that hasn't stopped scratchers from tagging the stainless steel inside the place.

Across from the Brunnenstr. stretch of Wall is a documentation center I admit I haven't gone to see, although I did visit it when it was owned by the church, on whose land the memorial wound up standing once the post-Wall paperwork was done. Back then, it appeared that the most horrible crime the Wall had occasioned was the dynamiting of the Schrippenkirche, the famous church which had stood there and had been caught between the two Walls. (Yes, there were two: a rather plain one on the eastern side, followed by a stretch of no-man's-land which was filled with booby-traps, dogs, and patrolling soldiers, and then the Wall we all know from the pictures.) In conjunction with the opening of the current documentation center, though, a number of glass signposts were erected all along Brunnenstr., which, because of its location with residential neighborhoods on either side and a huge wooded graveyard at the point where the current memorial stands, became a notorious death strip, with numerous escape attempts, many successful, occuring along the street. Also, the first person shot while trying to escape, a 19-year-old who bled to death in full view of West Berlin police who were unable to reach him without causing an international incident, was on Brunnenstr. right near the Nordbahnhof checkpoint. (There were numerous checkpoints, but they were all German-German for people going east to visit relatives; international visitors either had to use Checkpoint Charlie or Friedrichstr. station).

Given the horribleness of the Brunnenstr. official memorial and its inscription still taunting its neighbors, the cry of bad taste for Frau Hildebrandt's mass of crosses just doesn't wash, though. What's at play is a bit more subtle. It's the thing that's still haunting this city, the condition the Germans call Mauer im Kopf, the wall in the head. There's no question in my mind that it exists on both sides. Easterners are nostalgic for a time of full employment, even though it often wasn't very fulfilling work and it would eventually have bankrupted the country, since it depended on subsidies from Russia. Westerners are nostalgic for a time when West Berlin had its own subsidies, provided by the West German government and the governments of the Allies which occupied West Berlin until 1994. But Mauer im Kopf also means shoddier goods sold in the east (one need only visit a grocery store over here to see that in action), a persistent stereotyping of the other guy (Ossis are lazy and dumb; Wessis are yuppified and snobbish), and a general refusal (predominantly on the part of the Wessis) to visit the other side of town. Why, on my way back from Checkpoint Charlie I ran into an American who's been here for ages, and he told me he'd just rented a studio over here in the East. "I'm getting to like this part of town," he said. For those of you who don't remember the exact date, the Wall opened on Nov. 9, 1989.

But the right-wing mentality which operates the Museum am Checkpoint Charlie and is painfully obvious in the Widow Hildebrandt's public statements finds very little sympathy in official quarters in Berlin today. Yes, the Senate is governed by a coalition of the SPD (social democrats) and the PDS (successors to the communists, but really more a party of the left these days), and that, I think, actually does represent the feelings of Berliners who care to vote (and about 90% of them do, by the way). Frau Hildebrandt may want to keep the wall up in her own head, for very good business reasons as well as very questionable political reasons, but that doesn't mean she gets to trample the rights of the rest of us.

I say tear the damn things down.

HARALD'S DEAD (Pope, Too)

Boy, would I not like to be a tabloid journalist in Berlin right now; I'd be looking at a plate from which the meat and potatoes had been removed. (Everyone knows Germans don't eat vegetables).

Somehow, I missed the news that Harald Juhnke had died. For the scandal sheets, this is equivalent to Michael Jackson, P Diddy, and Britney Spears all perishing in a nightclub fire. One thing you could always count on: when the news slowed down, Juhnke would be in the headlines.

Not being German, and not being of a certain age, of course, I completely missed Juhnke's career. From what I've been able to make out, he was an entertainer who somehow survived the war, and built a postwar career as sort of Germany's answer to Frank Sinatra. Like Sinatra, he was a copious drinker, and like Sinatra, he recorded "New York, New York," only with new lyrics so that it came out "Berlin, Berlin." I've never had the pleasure of reading the words Juhnke pasted on to the song, but I'd like to give them a check for accuracy.

It was Juhnke's drinking that made the headlines, though. He was one of those people who'd drink in binges, who'd get blind drunk and keep on going for days. Unfortunately, unlike some people, he was a public figure, and he'd wind up pitching face-first into his dinner or collapsing in a hotel lobby somewhere and it'd make the news. One particularly horrible incident I remember was a series of photos with a screaming headline, "JUHNKE STAGGERS DOWN AN ALLEY." You could really see the pain and confusion on the poor guy's face; clearly he had no idea where he was, or what the flashing lights were all about as the vampires fed off of his disgrace. Vampires? That's being nice. I remember another front-page story which announed "We bought Harald Juhnke drinks to see what he'd do." Well, he did what you'd figure he'd do.

So as I spent my first few years in Berlin trying to figure out who this drunk was, I missed the fact that, when he was relatively sober, he was actually a star who commanded big fees, appeared on television, and all the rest. This was as much because German celebrity culture mainly focuses on people who are only celebrities in Germany as because German television, where I'd probably have caught his act, is so bad it dares you to watch it most of the time.

But because Juhnke showed up in the news so often, he was one of the few German celebrities whose name became part of the background noise here, and it didn't take long to figure out the cat-and-mouse game with the press, as well as the fact that he was famous for another reason. Then, he shocked everyone: he was going to retire. Apparently he'd made an ill-fated attempt to crack Hollywood (like they needed a middle-aged German alcoholic with no acting training) and then realized that maybe a dignified retreat from the scene was the wiser thing to do. He set a date for his farewell concert, and it sold out in mintues.

It was the farewell concert that brought to my attention that there was actually something to the man. As an opening act, he'd chosen Jocelyn B. Smith. She, too, is a local fixture, a black American singer who's decided that Berlin would be the place she'd make it in show-biz. Talented, but directionless, not averse to playing up the sort of weird exoticism Germany feels towards black people, an exoticism that's not quite racism and not quite not, she's always playing around, never quite breaking through. But Juhnke's gesture was moving; it was a sort of passing of the baton to the younger generation, giving her a chance to be seen by the faithful fans who'd stood by him all these years.

But when she took the stage, something horrible happened. Some of the audience started to boo, and others started yelling "Get the nigger off!" Juhnke stormed on stage and announced that he was not going to perform to an audience that behaved like that, that he'd chosen this singer himself, and that he was shocked and mortified that his fans would perform like this. It worked: the boos died away, and he got a round of applause, and Jocelyn went on with the show.

And, unlike a number of rock bands I could mention, Juhnke stood by his decision to retire. Not long afterwards, he entered a rehab facility, and it was announced that he wasn't in very good shape. Then he moved to a care facility, and there was much publicity as the press got all hypocritically concerned. And then, a few days ago, he died.

He managed to exit at about the same moment as the Pope did, which is probably why I didn't notice. The press, for their part, had tried to find other scandalous people to write about, but it just wasn't the same once Harald was off the set, and now he was gone for good. Pretty soon it'll be July, and we'll be moving into the Sommerloch, the "summer hole" where nothing happens. This was usually the time when we'd see the Harald headlines, but for the past few years, they haven't been there. And now they won't be, ever again.

I guess the moral of this is that everyone likes a scapegoat for their own failings, and that more than one drunk was moved to point at him and think "See, I'm not so bad." I have no idea what gifts this man may have had, but I do thank him for alerting me to the nature of celebrity journalism in this country. And I still do want to see those lyrics to "Berlin, Berlin."

Amsterdam

I'm still mulling over my trip to the States and my return, but I also wanted to write about the city I left from and returned to.

At least until those new direct flights I mentioned come on line you can't fly to the States directly from Berlin, so it's much cheaper to fly out of a place that does have direct flights. like Amsterdam. Plus, I had friends I wanted to see on each end of the trip there, and I could afford the train ticket. Train travel is wonderfully relaxing, and I needed to relax.

There was a point at which I thought I was going to move to Amsterdam: my friend Alex had discovered that a major newspaper there was going to launch an English-language magazine and needed an entire staff. This was perfectly suited to what I knew how to do, so I hotly pursued it. A good job in a city I'd come to like sounded pretty good, although in the end, both this project and another that cropped up simultaneously with it turned out to be chimeras.

But after this latest trip there, I somehow feel I dodged a bullet. I still like the place, and I'll happily visit when the opportunity and means coincide, but I don't think I'd like to live there. And since I know it's a place a lot of Americans fantasize about moving, maybe I should explain that a little better.

Part of it is the stairs. If you've ever been to a house in Amsterdam, or even some hotels, you know what I'm talking about: they're incredibly narrow, making it impossible to really stand on the step with any authority, and they're pitched at an incredible angle. Me, I've got acrophobia, and I've stood at the top of a couple of Dutch staircases and felt that cold sweat coming on. Not everywhere in Holland: mostly Amsterdam. The reason, Alex informs me, is that taxes on houses were levied based on how wide the house was, so you wouldn't want to have too fat a house or you'd be paying too much to the government. I'd also conjecture that the lots aren't too deep, either, since otherwise the stairs could be pitched more liberally. It's a little thing, maybe, but it sure was odd seeing my friend Mike climbing the stairs in his place like a ladder, stretching out his arms and pulling himself up by his hands as much as he was using his feet. But he got up and down fast.

That seems like a little thing, but big things are made up of little things. There's a parsimony about Dutch culture that I'm not comfortable with, and it goes way back, as Simon Schama proves so entertainingly in his book The Embarrassment of Riches, a lovely account of how the Dutch Calvinist religious beliefs started conflicting with their day-to-day life once the nation became one of the biggest mercantile powers on earth. Things have changed since the 16th Century, of course, but some of the basic issues remain. It seems perfectly logical to me that they'd make their staircases dangerously steep to save a bit of money -- and that they'd levy a tax that made it seem necessary.

Of course, you don't see that walking around. And I did a bunch of walking. For my return, I'd gone and given myself a treat -- two nights in a five-star hotel via Priceline for $88 a night. Unfortunately, I'd checked not only the button for "Central and Museum District" but also "South," so I wound up at the Holiday Inn by the RAI convention center, way south. A few minutes with a map showed me that I was theoretically only 45 minutes' walk from the central section I knew well, and after 12 hours on various airplanes and my refreshing jet-lag nap I was ready to take that walk, especially since at the end of it was the Spui and the fabulous Kantijl en de Tiger, a great Indonesian restaurant (most of the time: there seem to be two chefs, one better than the other, and I lucked out this time). So off I went, finding Beethovenstraat easily enough, and started the hike.

One reason I don't own a bike (another thing that'd get me funny looks if I lived in Amsterdam) is that I really do enjoy seeing things at a walker's pace, from a walker's perspective, without having to worry about traffic all the time. I look in shop windows, peek in apartment windows out of the corner of my eye, and let myself free-associate about what I'm seeing. And as I made my way up Beethovenstraat, something came to me: I was surrounded by the less picturesque Amsterdam, the part of town where people might actually live -- where I, for instance, would almost certainly have wound up if I'd gotten a job there. Out of nowhere, I got a strange feeling: these apartments were small. They had to be: there were a lot of them. Now, I knew, intellectually, that Holland is the most densely populated country in Europe by a long shot, but all of a sudden I had that made visible. My apartment here in Berlin is small, too, but I get the feeling that it'd be larger than average in Amsterdam.

But even fantasizing enough money for something bigger, the density is something that's going to be with you every time you leave the house. It's one of the good things about Berlin: because until recently they couldn't build much higher than five stories, and because the place is sprawled out like Los Angeles, it's a big, populous city, but it's just not as dense. It's broken up by the largest per-square-mile ratio of green-space of any European city. I've never felt jammed in here. And I have in Amsterdam, and in Paris, too, for that matter. It's not exactly oppressive, but it is annoying, and that could escalate.

Offsetting that, of course, are a lot of positive things about Amsterdam. It's genuinely multi-cultural: on the way from the Holiday Inn I saw posters for the upcoming Zimbabwean election, since, presumably, expat Zimbabweans were going to cast absentee ballots just as I had back in November. (I also saw a lot of posters slapped up here and there with a picture of a stern-looking Middle Eastern man and the caption JIHAD IS OVER IF YOU WANT IT, which I thought was pretty good). The Dutch are, to a point, tolerant (although the impulses that made Pim Fortuyn a star bubble beneath the surface, just like they do all over Europe), and this is something I appreciate. The people are by and large friendly, and I have to say that the women seem happier than Berlin women, who always strike me as looking like they're voluntarily reporting to their own execution. And there's a whimsy to Dutch culture that I think Americans notice, certainly an unknown quality in Germany, where the same impulse tends to come out either as kitsch or scatology.

But...could I live there? I don't think so. My Dutch friends hate it when I say this, but, in the end, it's another Germanic culture, if we divide Western Europe up into Germanic and Latin cultures, which makes sense to me (Belgium, for instance, is right on the border of the two). There's a Protestant rectitude, a certain amount of uptightness that no quantity of semi-legal pot from a coffeehouse is going to relax, underlying the vibe in Amsterdam, and for the moment I've had enough of that. And there's also the little problem of having to learn Dutch -- not just as a courtesy, which is why I'd do it in the first place, but in order to get a residence permit now you have to be able to speak it, and I'm just not interested in learning yet another language, one that very few people in this world speak. And yes, I know they all speak English there. It's the mandatory aspect that gets my goat.

Nope: like San Francisco and Paris -- but deeply unlike them as they are unlike each other -- Amsterdam's the proverbial nice place to visit that I wouldn't want to live in. And next time I'll know how to game Priceline better, too.

What It Was Like, Part 1

"So...what was it like?" It's what everyone wants to know when you go on vacation, after all. So, not to promise there'll be a Part 2 to this, but here are some impressions, sort of free-association-like.

There was extra security at the airport, and the airport folks felt perfectly fine about letting us know that it was because we were flying to America that they had to ask all these questions. It seemed to vex them no little amount. Once in the air, though, there was a definite damper on the mood. Maybe I just drew a cranky flight crew, but levity of any sort was discouraged with icy looks, and there's a new protocol for using the bathrooms they didn't explain to us, so I almost caused an alarm in the middle of the flight when I tried to get to the john forward of where I was sitting instead of going to the back. The tension certainly does accrete during a ten-hour flight, so I was jumpy when I got off.

Of course, for the 20-minute flight from Houston to Austin, we had to change buildings, so after dropping off my luggage and hiking to the building where the new gate was, there was additional security to go through, and here they made us take our shoes off. This remains the stupidest part of airport security, in my opinion. Have they ever found anything in shoes? Further, this was supposedly implemented after that British half-wit tried to light alleged bombs in his sneakers, and yet according to the signs I saw on my way out of the country, it's only starting on April 15 that people will not be allowed to carry cigarette lighters on their persons or in their carry-ons. But making people take their shoes off is a major inconvenience, and focuses one's attention on the fear that's so important to this administration's retaining control. One friend noted that the practice was discontinued in the Austin airport for a while, but reinstituted just before the election. Aha.

The next major problem came at the hotel. Although my hosts had arranged to pay for it, the hotel required $50 or a credit card for "incidentals" like phone calls. Due to my financial catastrophe, I've lost my last credit card and it's very unlikely I'll ever have another. In Europe, this isn't such a big deal, but in America it means you're either a nobody or some species of criminal. Since it was Saturday night, and late, I didn't have access to my bank, so I asked if I could perhaps have my phone turned on until I could get some American cash. The answer was no. "It's our percedure," the robot-like girl at the desk said. And there was no way of talking her out of it. She, however, was a trainee, so I figured the day shift would be better. And it was. The woman turned me right on, and I went about my business all day, doing the usual things to get set up for a week's stay in a hotel: buying coffee and breakfast stuff, and, of course, getting set up to see some friends for dinner. Getting back to the hotel late, I found a message from Ms. Percedure telling me that the three calls I'd made amounted to $1.50, and that my phone had been cut off until I could pay it. Having checked my e-mail, I discovered that of the nearly $3000 I was owed, not a cent had made it in yet, so I was stuck with about twenty bucks in cash. I wasn't about to give in on this one. Neither, unfortunately, was she. It took two days and a visit from someone who had much, much better things to do than deal with this before it was made clear to the hotel that I was not a sleazy criminal, that I would, in fact, pay my incidentals bill (which came to something like $6.00 on the day I checked out), and that if I skipped, he would pay.

This sort of surly, no-exceptions, humorless vibe, I found, was all over the place. Do what you're told, the feeling was, or we'll fight. Weirdly, nobody seems to mind.

The other motif of the trip was overconsumption and overproduction. This was evident on my first full day, when I went to pick up my rental car. I managed to get a PT Cruiser (the most-stolen car in Holland, I later learned), which looks cool but is actually an adolescent SUV, especially as regards gas mileage. Man, what a hog! But I wasn't aware of that as I stood by it waiting for the guy to fill out the paperwork, and stared at the vehicle which was filling -- and I mean filling -- the rental agency's carwash. It was called an Armada. Later in the trip, I got to see numerous idiots driving Hummers bedizened with enough chrome to make oncoming drivers require sunglasses. Gas is over two dollars a gallon; what are these people thinking?

Probably the same thing I noticed when I drove through my old neighborhood and saw where old houses had been demolished to make room for structures that filled every square inch of space on the lot they were built on. No yards for the kids to play in, but then, people who live in houses like that don't let their kids play outdoors unless it's an organized sports activity for which they'll get extra credit and thereby make it easier for them to get into college. The houses seemed to be constructed from some sort of plastic material, but I didn't bother to touch them for fear of setting off an alarm.

I got to eat out a lot, in part thanks to friends who bought me meals as I continued to wait -- and wait -- for my checks to come. As I often do when I'm worried about money, I ate too much. Even so, it was hard to finish the portions in most restaurants, and I'd get that unpleasant sweaty feeling of being over-full before the plate was cleaned. That said, I noticed fewer morbidly obese people than I have on previous trips. Either people are getting back into shape, or they've died off. But trips to the supermarkets confirmed that the cheaper the food, the larger the container you can buy it in. I saw sacks of potato chips that'd take two people to lift.

Of course, I spent my whole time in Austin (with the exception of one trip to San Marcos to see a panel on Grover Lewis and to celebrate his widow's donating his archives to Texas State, as well as the publication of Splendor in the Short Grass, the new collection of his writing), and thus I think I avoided a lot of the worst culture-shocking I might have encountered had I ventured too far past its city limits. Not that I think I could live in Austin again, but the worst of the right-wing theocratical mind-set is pretty alien to the place still. I'm not convinced it is up in, say, Dallas. But then, why would anyone go there?

As to overproduction, it was very evident at SXSW, as it has been for some time. There's simply too much music out there, and, for me, at least, sifting through it has ceased to be any fun at all. The sheer noise when one walks down 6th St. during SXSW -- music pounding out of just about every structure on the street at maximum level -- is extremely disheartening. Not to mention that with something like 1400 performers on deck, it's impossible to figure out if any of it's worth listening to. I found some (Susan Cowsill, Jason Moran, a strange band from Cincinnati called the Heartless Bastards who may have to change their name if James McMurtry's long-standing band hears of their existence), but in the end, the amount of game I caught wasn't worth the irritation of the hunt.

Or maybe I was just worn down from arguing with hotel robots and compulsively checking my bank balance (one of the checks -- the really big one -- hasn't shown up yet, four weeks later) and waiting for the folks I was supposed to meet in Louisiana to get in touch (they never did, so yet another year has gone by without my getting over there, dammit -- not that I'd have had the money to do it this year anyway), and wondering at the new Whole Foods Market in Austin, the most over-the-top food store I have ever seen, with its $18 pasta bar and huge underground parking garage and incomprehensible layout, a far cry from the homey, friendly place just down Lamar where that gigantic chain started out, a place so friendly that when it was flooded in 1983 (I think it was), people volunteered their time to help them dig out. Nowadays, if that happened in this place, I imagine the response would be quite different.

I dunno, there must be some good things about this trip to remember, but they're just not coming at the moment. I'm sure I'll have more to add, but I'm also aware that the snow has gone from Berlin and I have something I've been wanting to write for some time that's dependent on my taking photos of the bare ground, more evidence, if you need any, that Berlin bites.

Stay tuned.

The Times Discovers Berlin! (Again)

It was going to be a vacation. Take the train to Amsterdam, see an old friend, eat some different food, relax for part of a day, then get on a plane and emerge some hours later in Austin, where there'd be no snow, and fewer gloomy faces.

And it just about worked, too. By the time I got off the train in Amsterdam Centraal, I was beginning to unwind. An evening with Mike Stewart talking about old times and listening to some of the stuff he's currently producing (I think Marynka has some great stuff working) and then going out for a Surinamese dinner (it's a weird collision of Indian, Chinese and Caribbean cuisines, tasty and cheap), and Berlin was sliding away out of my memory.

The next morning, I took a tram to the train to the airport, and, before I headed to the gate, I thought, hey, I should pick up an International Herald Tribune to read, especially since it's Saturday and all, and I can get the New York Times crossword a day early. (Right about now, Andy Zwerling is getting ready to write me an e-mail telling me that if I were cool enough to live in New York I'd have it on Thursday night. You should buy his record anyway).

And, because I wanted to check the weather, which is on the back page, I flipped the paper over as soon as I'd wedged into my airplane seat, and of all things, here was yet another article about how cool Berlin was! And of course I had to read it.

This time, like the last time the Times wrote about arty, Bohemian Berlin -- a whopping three weeks previously -- the guy got a lot of stuff right. No, not the part about Lou Reed living here (when are people going to realize that he may have written a pompous, overblown "rock opera" called Berlin, but he'd never seen the damn place when he did so?), nor the recommendation of the Paris Bar, treating its non-celebrity customers like pariahs since before the Wall came down (why anyone goes there twice is a mystery to me). But he noticed the new galleries on Zimmerstr., although I don't necessarily agree with his exact choices, that was smart. But the rest of the article was a rehash of the obvious: Kreuzberg has cheap apartments! (Hell, it's had them since at least 1968, when it was a Turkish slum squatted by hippies). Berlin is cheap! (Yeah, that's because of the unemployment, only noted by the arch young man in the gallery up towards the start of the article saying "Nobody works in Berlin. Everyone's either an artist or a politician," which'll come as a huge surprise to lots of my neighbors, who don't have either excuse for not working.)

And after that, the writer, one Richard K. Woodward, glancingly mentions the museums on Museum Island, the ones even the worst guidebooks mention, and pays a visit to the Sammlung Hoffmann, open one day a month if you can get on the guided tour. That brought back memories, because the radio station I used to work for was there in the Sophien-Gips-Höfe, and I hadn't realized that our landlord, Rolf Hoffmann, had died. I met him once at an art party (where I also consumed spinach soup made with gin -- aren't artists wacky?) and he spilled a huge glass of red wine on my shirt, commenting "I have baptized you!" Still, any church that has art by Pipilotti Rist, Antichrist of contemporary art, is one I'm not joining any time soon.

In the end it's another blah-blah story about the galleries, many of which will fold soon when they either can't afford their spaces or their hot young artists cool, about the artists who'll eventually get tired of a place with horrible weather and a population that basically hates innovation and loves to say no, and the scenesters who drift around the galleries wondering if they look cool enough. All, of course, supported by dull generalities ("Techno has roots in Berlin" -- and Detroit, of course, but those guys are black and Americans don't notice them, although the Germans do), clichés about tourists like David Bowie (and non-tourists like Lou Reed), and recommendations for the Paris Bar. One would think the Times could do better, but given what their travel section, where this article appeared, pays, maybe not.

Which is not to say that there isn't a blockbuster of good news in the article. I quote: "During the cold war, visiting Berlin required changes of planes, layovers and worries about visas should you want to stray into Communist territory. And even after the Wall fell, getting to Berlin didn't get much easier, with almost no direct flights out of the United States.

"But that will soon change, when Delta starts nonstop service out of Kennedy International Airport on May 2, and Continental does the same out of Newark on July 1."

Now, that is news: cheap flights to/from the States when the service debuts, followed by increasingly empty planes and both airlines' withdrawal from the market, no doubt. That's what happened with American and United. But if you're coming, there are two dates to start looking into: there'll be loss-leaders from both airlines, unless I miss my bet.

Anyway, I carried that damn article around for two weeks thinking I'd have enough peace of mind to sit down and write this entry, but it never happened. I got home last night, and so I'll be talking a bit about just why I didn't have time over the next couple of days. Stay tuned.

Thoughts Before A Journey

I suspect the next 24 hours are going to be insane, as I pack for my trip to Texas, check to see what bills I can pay before I leave, and do the last-minute stuff that's an inevitable part of travelling. With snow pounding down in thick, wet flakes outside, which started while I was at the ARD studios recording my next batch of Fresh Air pieces, I simply cannot wait to be in Austin, where Saturday's high is predicted to be 77 degrees Fahrenheit (that's 25 Celsius, just to make my European readers feel terrible).

But there's always a sense of apprehension, and these days it's more than my admittedly irrational fear of flying. The country I return to on these brief visits is not the country I left. Well, fair enough, you say, after eleven years it hardly could be. But it's changed in ways I have trouble understanding, ways which scare me and the rest of the world. Once I'm in Austin, I see very few signs of this change, although there are just enough to remind me they're there. But the soldiers everywhere, the tension in the airport (I almost had security called on me last year when I asked if I could change my return ticket: I wasn't aware that I couldn't, and all it took was my protesting mildly for the woman to panic), and the pall of fear that you can feel, if not see, all make me realize that it's not a place I want to spend a lot of time.

My reaction isn't like some people over here. I had dinner the other night with a couple I know. He's German, she's American, and neither of them is doing all that well. With a young child now to support, they're naturally thinking how they could make things better for themselves and their kid, and at one point in the conversation, the German guy said "It's very difficult. You know the unemployment here is over 20% and it's more than that here in Berlin. The figures are the closest we've ever come since the days of the rise of fascism." He paused. "So for a German with ties to America, the question becomes, do we deal with the place where the conditions are exactly as they were when fascism arose, or do we move to the place which is already fascist?"

Now, I wouldn't call this guy's politics mainstream, but he's just voicing what a lot of Germans feel at least as a possibility. After all, they're not seeing the movie from inside, and they're just as subject to media manipulation as anyone, and a lot of what they see looks eerily familiar. I still believe that America will recover from the crew of radicals who are running it at the moment, and that perhaps the experience will teach some people some lessons and help them cherish their freedoms a little more. But Germans see a crazed leader, intent on invading other countries, supported by a cadre of true believers, and they get a real bad sense of deja vu. That's no more the case than the American vision of a Germany overrun with neo-nazi skinheads is, but I think a lot of people here are a bit unsettled by the possibility that there might be more than a grain of truth there. And there's another problem: the Germans have always felt an affinity for the Americans, who treated them humanely and helped them build back their economy after defeating them in World War II. If this could happen to our friends, some of these people must be thinking, can it happen to us?

And thus the nervous feeling: in a generation, Germany has gone from pretty much full employment, from a situation where there were so many jobs that they welcomed Italians and Turks into the country to do the jobs they couldn't get Germans to do, to a situation where one in five people is out of work. I'd say that simply because so many people are aware of the story as it happened last time that the rise of fascism in Germany is one of the least likely scenarios here. The far right party that's been making the news of late, the NDP, is a tiny minority which only does well in the regions worst-hit by the economic blight, and even then, the voters tend to turn on them when they see that all they've managed to do is to turn their state legislature into a pack of pariahs. When I first moved here, everyone was scared of the Republikaner, the (pardon) Republican Party, which was headed by an old guy who was widely rumored to be a maybe-not-so-ex-nazi, and whose election posters were as scurrilous and vile as I've ever seen: Germany for the Germans! But you never hear about them these days.

So I'll strike a deal with you Germans: I won't be scared of your country if you don't be scared of mine. You know good and well that a few guys with no hair and back-country accents can't make a popular revolution in this country, not as media-saturated as it's gotten. And I know that in America, the lessons of the last election -- which was only a couple of months ago, don't forget -- are being analyzed and re-thought, and I wouldn't be surprised to see some fairly interesting things happen around next year's elections. And no, I don't think we'll be invading Iran in June. What y'all should consider is taking an American vacation, because I don't think the dollar's going to recover any time soon, and boy, is it cheap over there right now. You don't have to fear the natives because you're Germans, and Germans are fearless travellers. They must be: there's a travel agency right around the corner here offering €749 packages to Kabul, for heaven's sake. If you can hack that, you can hack America.

Anyway, I know that 80% of you just fly to Orlando and lie on the beach.

***

More cross-cultural studies are provided in this astonishing article about an ex-Austinite revisiting the old stomping grounds. He's the mirror image of me: he likes Germany, for one thing, but, as someone commented, that's probably because he lives in Freiburg. All you need to know about Freiburg is that it's the place where I was talking to a guy who lived in a large apartment with a bunch of other people and he told me that on weekends, they drew lots to see who'd go shopping in Switzerland, who'd go to France, and who'd go to Italy, all of which are just a short drive away. Not Berlin, in other words. But this guy is part of the huge Berlin-Austin axis, which is something I have yet to figure out.

Anyway, enjoy. I'm off Friday for South By Southwest, and I don't know if I'll have the time or inclination to write much here, although if my proposed trip over into Cajun country happens, there'll probably be photographs. What's left of my jet-lagged self will be back on Mar. 30, at which point I think it's pretty inevitable that I'll start complaining about Berlin again.

Crumbs, February 32, 2005

Yeah, it may say March on your calendar, but I look out the window, and it's still February out there.

***

Thanks to Jakob for sending along news of a newly-created web publication dedicated to translating the best of Germany's newspapers' feuilleton pages into English. Signandsight is located literally around the corner from me, in what Wired magazine once predicted would be Germany's Silicon Valley until the local anti-innovation movement ("Why should we do that? It's never been done before") drove a lot of the innovators out of town. But this project seems to have some government support, three dedicated Germanophiles doing the translating, and a hefty, nearly impenetrable manifesto to impress the folks who deal out the money. A great place to check out the (as we say here) zeitgeist, and, perhaps just as importantly, to see if the German press lives up to its high reputation. As someone who was extremely disappointed with the English version of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung once it started appearing in the International Herald Tribune, I'm going to be following this with interest. At the least, I hope they have a sympathetic landlord.

***

Further thanks to David for sending me a review from Amazon of Machers and Rockers by none other than Bob Pruter. I once read Pruter's book Chicago Soul back when I had my blues/soul/gospel radio show here and the prose was so narcotic that I did a whole two-hour show on Chicago soul not only to please my listeners (who loved it) but to remind myself that the stuff was actually interesting. But one thing: Pruter is a researcher, there's no doubt of that. And besides all the stuff that I brought up in my perhaps overly angry review, Pruter pointed out that Cohen also got nearly all the addresses in the book wrong, too. Okay, maybe this isn't quite as serious as Jayson Blair, but maybe someone can explain to me why it's any different. David also alleges that he got a lot of stuff in Tough Jews wrong, too, and recommends a book called But He Was Good To His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters, by Robert A. Rockaway, which is currently out of print. Me, I'm just happy to see that someone wrote a book on that subject and gave it that title!

***

I'll leave you with a true anecdote of cultural sophistication here in the World City. A few months ago, I discovered Centro Italia, the local wholesale Italian food market, which sells mostly to the restaurant trade, but, because of some strange law here, is also obligated to open for retail sales (albeit with higher prices) to the general public. It's sort of like I imagine Heaven to be, except in Heaven there's no cash register on the way out, the wine selection is better and the salsiccie have fennel and red pepper the way God intended. (Of course, you couldn't sell those to Germans, but I think they get a different Heaven).

Anyway, I was walking down the aisle, buying olive oil and Voiello pasta (the best in the world, made by Barillo for the trade, apparently) and other stuff and this very well-dressed middle-aged woman came up to me with a jar in her hand. "Excuse me," she said. "Are these capers?" I looked at the label -- piselli -- and said "No, those are green peas." "Oh." And she continued shopping. A minute later she was back. "What about these?" "Nope. Those are clams." Fortunately, I noticed I was standing right in front of the capers (which were labelled in German), and pointed them out to her. She was visibly relieved.

And lest you think capers are as foreign to Berlin tables as clams are, I should point out that they're an integral part of one of the few pieces of Berlin cuisine, Königsberger Klopse, which are meatballs in cream gravy with capers in it. Go figure.

An Unnecessary Book

I've just wasted two evenings of my life, evenings I could have spent improving my mind, with a book that's so bad that I'm mourning the trees it took to create it. Bad books are nothing new for me: I seem to come across them all the time. Just recently, I was in the English-book section of a local bookstore and picked up an 800-page sci-fi novel that only cost €5. I should have known it was crap, and it certainly was: a sort of space-opera of the sort I'd thought perished with A.E. van Vogt, bane of my sci-fi-reading teenage years.

But this was different. It came in a package my producer at Fresh Air had sent with a book I'd asked her to find me for a possible piece. She thought this one might interest me, and I thank her for that. Her instincts were certainly right, but it left me in despair.

It's called Machers and Rockers: Chess Records and the Business of Rock and Roll, and it's by Rich Cohen, whose book on Jewish gangsters, Tough Jews, I read a few years ago and liked. On the back are encomia from Larry King (a friend of Cohen's father) and Jann Wenner (Cohen's employer). And it's certainly a great idea. Phil and Leonard Chess were certainly tough Jews, immigrants from Poland (where their name was Cyzsz) who landed in Chicago, got into first the liquor business and then the nightclub business on the black South Side, and were smart enough to realize that there was money to be made with the music the schvartzes they served made. Once they got rolling, they lucked into Muddy Waters, who was in the ascendant as king of the Chicago blues, and, through him, they found others, such as Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Willie Dixon, John Brim, Koko Taylor, Jimmy Rogers, and many others. Then, a guitarist recommended by Muddy showed up at their door, a 19-year-old kid named Chuck Berry, and they suddenly found themselves helping to invent rock and roll. In this, as it developed, they sowed the seeds of their own destruction, although they had no way of knowing it at the time; as Cohen points out, they were only trying to make a buck, which is what they had always been trying to do.

There's a reason why Jews were so prominent in the independent record business after World War II, and the Chess brothers epitomize that reason: Jews were still marginal to America, and so, as they had in Hollywood, they found niches in marginal businesses. A lot of them worked in the black sections of America's cities, and they had something of a knowledge of what the black people who lived there wanted. Plus, making records was a business that, while high-risk, had a potentially high payoff, especially if you indulged in the time-honored tradition of stiffing your artists, a practice hardly limited to Jews: just ask Don Robey, or John Dolphin, or Jack Lauderdale, all black label owners (Duke/Peacock, Made In Hollywood/Dolphin, and Swingtime, respectively), all notorious ripoffs, if not outright gangsters. Like the junk business or the rag trade their fathers had plied, selling music to black people was a job no "respectable" person -- read WASP -- wanted.

Phil and Leonard became millionaires, and Chess second only to Atlantic in revenues as an indie. It's a compelling story, and it's been told in a book called Spinning Blues Into Gold, by Nadine Cohodas, a book I've never even seen.

Machers and Rockers is published by W.W. Norton's Atlas Books subsidiary in a series called Enterprise, which apparently profiles businesses: there's also a book on Ted Turner by Ken Auletta, and Tim Parks has one coming on the Medicis, which ought to be fun. So this isn't one of those quickie cut-and-paste operations like litter the rock-book landscape.

With a lineup that incudes Auletta and Parks, though, you'd think there was an editor who would take this stuff seriously, which is one reason this book is so appalling. Oh, sure, it starts off fine, with a chapter entitled "Today You Are A Man, Get Me a Drink," in which Cohen, in full gonzo mode, imagines the Bar Mitzvah of Marshall Chess, Leonard's son, and heir apparent to the label and all its workings. I know people who are still jealous of Marshall for having had the Flamingoes sing at his Bar Mitzvah. Hell, I'm jealous, and I'm not even Jewish! Cohen does a fine job of presenting the mix of people who were there: old Jews from the traditional life, particularly the merchants who ran shops on Maxwell Street on the South Side, where a flea-market flourished on weekends and young blues guys in search of a break would set up and entertain the shoppers. Then other folks from the record industry: DJs, distributors, competing label guys. And, behind them, the black folks who worked at Chess; not just the musicians, but people who ran the mail room and the packing room and pressed the records. It's a nice introduction for someone who doesn't know the business.

And, right there on page 17, five pages in, is the first mistake: Hy Weiss is identified as the founder of Bang Records, which didn't even exist in 1955, when Marshall Chess became a man in the eyes of his congregation. When it did exist, nearly a decade later, it was named for the initials of the four men who set it up: Bert Berns, Ahmet Ertegun, Neshui Ertegun and Gerald Wexler. Weiss, as any record collector could have told you, ran Old Town, New York's legendary doo-wop label. And yeah, he was probably there.

It doesn't get better. Cohen's so in love with the way he writes -- and he ought to be, it's a lot of fun, the voice of a classic tummler of the post-Lenny Bruce era spritzing on Jews and schvartzes and any other poor schmuck who gets in the way, reveling in the sleazy details of the record business -- that he's not overly concerned with either chronology or facts. The chronology is a judgement call: I would have found the story more dramatic if he'd unfolded it in its classic arc, the rags-to-riches one, ending with the Chess brothers millionaires but cheated out of their legacy, and Leonard's dramatic death: one more outrage foisted on him by the company that he'd sold the label to made him apoplectic, he jumped into his Cadillac and zoomed off, only to have a massive coronary and plow into a couple of parked cars.

But, like I said, that's a judgement call. The facts are a more serious problem. It's not just Hy Weiss: at one point Cohen lists the artists who were on Chess, and I've got news for him. Chess had a serious roster of talent, one which produced an amazing body of work: I have a 13-CD set here commemorating Chess' 50th anniversary and there's no fat. But Rich, Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown was the rock on which Don Robey founded his empire: he never recorded for Chess. Yes, the Moonglows were on Chess, but no, Ben E. King, lead singer for the Drifters who later went solo, wasn't their lead singer. That was Harvey Fuqua, who mentored Marvin Gaye. I certainly wouldn't call Dale Hawkins a "crooner," nor would I use that word for primitive country bluesmen like Joe Hill Louis or Dr. Isaiah Ross, neither of whom recorded for Chess. Neither did another of your "crooners," Rufus Thomas, and certainly Bobby "Blue" Bland never did, although there you at least got the "crooner" part right. A key player at Chess was a former boxer and all-round utility musician named Elias McDaniel, who later recorded under the name Bo Diddley, and you managed to spell both of those names wrong. And, later on? GRT did make tape, true, but the cassette wasn't their invention: that was Phillips in Holland.

These are the sorts of mistakes that might be made by an enthusiast in conversation, or written in a fanzine by a teenager, but when a contributing editor of Rolling Stone enshrines them between hard covers, we expect them to be true. And nor have I cherry-picked a couple of howlers; every couple of pages a factual error or statement based on a faulty interpretation of data or an assertion of fact that can't be backed up appears.

And this pisses me off. Sure, some of you must be thinking. You're pissed off because you didn't get to write this book. And you're partially right: I bet Rich Cohen doesn't wake up at night with anxiety attacks because he's months and months behind in his rent, and I bet when he pitches ideas to magazines, they at least answer him. I bet the advance on this book would have paid off my back rent and paid off the people who have been kind enough to loan me money to fix my teeth and keep the electricity on. I know for a fact that Rich Cohen has an agent, and I bet that agent doesn't scoff at his ideas.

So yeah, I'm jealous that someone can take one part good idea, three parts padding, and two parts bullshit and get it published.

But there's also this: there just isn't that much space for books like this in the marketplace. Because of hackwork cut-and-paste jobs like the Brits churn out by the boxcar-full, it's harder and harder for serious books on popular music to get printed. Hell, it's harder and harder for books, period, to get printed. But at least the cut-and-pastes tend to be published by a couple of publishers, and the marketplace recognizes them as such. This is Norton, who also published The Rose and the Briar, a collection edited by Greil Marcus and Sean Willentz that came out last fall and has yet to be reviewed in the New York Times or the New York Review of Books and which has actual good writing and solid research (hey, there's a picture of Frankie, as in Frankie and Johnny!) by actual serious writers including me, goddammit! And they're publishing what purports to be a serious (if offhandedly written, not that I have any problem with that) look at an American cultural and business phenomenon, but reads like something written in a week with no more expenditure than a hefty bill at Starbuck's to keep the head of steam going.

Okay, I'm done. Just another day in the life of a writer. Maybe the other book is better.

Last Crumbs Of February

Just a couple of things to note here. The first is a rather nasty little send-off to Hunter Thompson by the San Francisco Chronicle's executive foreign and national editor, A.S. Ross. Thing is, much of what he says is right, and it got a lot of people on the Well all upset today because they felt it wasn't respectful. I don't think that's the problem at all. Like Sidney Zion's piece in the New York Daily News, it's a sort of knee-jerk dismissal of Thompson made from a carefully-crafted one-sided view of him. Zion just maunders, and his piece is easily dismissed. Ross', on the other hand, backs up his case with evidence, and damning evidence it is, too: Thompson at his most self-parodic.

He's also got quotes from a veteran of the times: John Burks, now head of San Francisco State University's journalism department, was the managing editor of Rolling Stone when I worked there. He was at least as responsible for hiring me as Jann Wenner was. He managed the fine pack of journalists he'd helped assemble, and turned them into a crack news team; I've always thought of John as my journalism school. One thing many of the people on this team (not me: I was in charge of record reviews and some industry news, for the most part) did was assemble a number of articles for which the magazine won the Columbia Journalism Award in 1971. Not one member of that group of journalists, including Burks, was still employed by Rolling Stone on the day Wenner accepted the award. As far as I know, he was never thanked or acknowledged. This may or may not figure into the quotes Burks gave Ross.

But finally, what's most glaringly missing from Ross's sour eulogy is compassion. I've joked that the only thing that's kept me from killing myself is the sure knowledge that my obit in the New York Times would be headed "Ed Ward, Rock Critic," and that's a fate worse than death. In other words, I know what it's like to get trapped by a situation you've created, whether inadvertently (as in my case) or not (as in Thompson's). I still have some control over this: I'm pretty obscure, so I may yet be able to write some things I'll be proud of. Thompson, on the other hand, created a monster. Sometimes we just don't have as much control over these things as we'd like, and the bigger the monster, the harder it is to wrestle it to the ground and make it cry uncle.

Ross probably has never had this problem. Maybe he never will. But that shouldn't make him dismissive of those who've struggled with it and lost.

***

On a much lighter note, the Pope of mope sends along an article about burritos in Berlin. I've walked past this place numerous times, but the thing that's kept me from going in is that they don't use refried beans in the burritos! That's inconceivable to me. As someone who's been eating the things since discovering Burrito King (2109 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles) in the 1970s and then seeing them perfected at San Francisco taquerias like Taqueria La Cumbre (Valencia between 15th and 16th) this is complete heresy. On the other hand, the lack of Mexican food in this town is severe (never mind the "Mexican" or "Tex Mex" places whose idea of "Mexican" food runs from Buffalo wings to paella to the abomination the Germans call "Chile Con Carne" with nary a taco nor an enchilada, let alone a chille relleno or tamale, in sight), and I'm sure I'm going to be pulled in some day on nostalgia alone. Will I then echo the Pope's judgement? "I ate at Dolores once," he writes. "You could taste the earnestness. But not the hot sauce."

Big surprise, that.

***

And in closing, let me say how shocked I was to learn that Billy Idol had put in an appearance at White Trash Fast Food. I'm well aware that my neighborhood contains drug addicts, alcoholics (lotsa them), probably more than a few wife-beaters, sexual deviants, and psychos. But Billy Idol??

Ewwww.

Even More Crumbs

February drags on, reminding me once again why it's such a hard month here. Currently, we're caught up in what seems to be an endless snow-slush-freeze-rain-snow cycle. The Eskimos' having 47 words for snow may be a canard, but it's rather surprising, given the immense variety of the crap that pours from the heavens here, that the Germans don't have a bunch of them.

Thing is, it can make walking very difficult because the sidewalks don't get cleared a lot of places, and you never know when the fresh layer of powder conceals a slippery re-frozen bunch of slush underneath it. Of course, a lot of places strew cinders to assure traction, which is nice, but you wind up bringing them back into the house on your shoes and the rug gets gritty overnight.

And, as if to prove that the photo-period thing is a myth, it's still slightly light at 6pm these days. Two weeks, and I'll be in Texas. Not that I'm, you know, counting.

***

One of my readers has pointed me to a very nice piece she's written in Salon, an interview with Hitler's last living bodyguard. If you want the famous "banality of evil," you need go no further. He's living in Rudow, which is the end-station of one of the subway lines here. I always wondered what was in Rudow, and now I know one thing that is. Read it: it's pretty fascinating.

***

A comment posted here that Podewil may be starting up again in April was very welcome news. Whether the organization will be based again in the building on Klosterstr. I don't know: it's in the middle of a bunch of court buildings, and I know the courts system has been trying to grab the Podewil building to stick its functionaries in ever since the government moved here from Bonn. They also tried to get the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, which seems to have beaten them back for the moment, but we'll see what happens. Meanwhile, I've signed back up for their newsletter, so if anything interesting happens, I'll let you know.

***

Yesterday, Lucian Truscott IV had a rather dull little tribute to Hunter S. Thompson in the New York Times, in which he commented that his correspondence with HST back in the late '60s seemed completely concerned with money. This hardly surprises me. The nature of a freelance writer's life is that you're always worried about money. People never pay on time, often have to be cajoled out of just a few bucks, and the bills always seem to come faster than the checks. In fact, I just got another letter from my kind landlord reminding me that I'm now nine months behind in the rent, something I'd hoped to avoid with some of the work I've been doing, but of course I'm still sitting here waiting to get paid. There's some potentially good news on the horizon, though, which could not only pay all of this off but make a significant contribution towards getting me out of here. Nothing definite, nothing signed, no date as of yet, but enough that I didn't feel the dull stab of panic when the letter arrived. I still have to pay the electric and phone companies before I leave, and I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do that, but who knows? Stranger things have happened.

***

Seeing Wally, the guy who runs White Trash Fast Food, the club/restaurant on the corner by my house, while I was in the supermarket just now, reminded me of a story I'd wanted to post here. I've given them a hard time for their relentlessly ironic beating to death of what they call "white trash" culture, and what I call working-class American culture, and their inability to discriminate between poor people and "white trash," whatever that is, but Wally scored some points a month or two back when he was buzzing around the club and someone tapped him on the shoulder. "Are you Wally?" said a familiar voice, and there stood Mick Jagger. "I hear this is the coolest club in town," he said. "Oh yeah?" said Wally. "So how'd you get in?"

Good question, and a fine illustration of the futility and stupidity of being cool.

A Taxing Woman

Today I had a visit from the tax folks. This was not a surprise. I've been getting, and not opening, letters from them for a couple of years. No, it's not the income tax folks. It's the TV tax.

This is an aspect of life in Europe that surprises a lot of Americans. Every radio-operated device you buy requires that you register it with an agency which regulates public broadcasting, after which you are asked to pay a tax on each device. For me, it was one radio and one television, and the levy was €35 every two months.

This money goes into a central account in Cologne, and is then disbursed into the various local, regional, and national public stations. Once upon a time, that's all there were here: commercial TV was only beginning to come into the larger cities when I first came here in 1988, and I believe (but don't take this as gospel) that commercial radio came even later. And, like the way NPR and PBS used to be in the States, it ensured a certain level of broadcast quality, and gave the stations money to do all manner of creative things. Karlheinz Stockhausen's early career was bankrolled by the regional radio station in Cologne, and most major cities had a radio symphony orchestra subsidized by this tax. Television stations had the budget to produce superb news shows and documentaries, and to acquire films to show, uninterrupted by commercials. One of my favorite memories was the all-garlic meal Les Blank cooked one night for a guy from WDR, who wanted to lease the rights to a couple of Les' films for a short while. Les figured to get him stoned on garlic (which actually has a tranquillizing effect when eaten in large quantity) and then hit him up for enough money that he could finish his work-in-progress, which became Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers. It worked.

In principle, I support this fee, of course (as if you couldn't tell from the preceding paragraph). If the U.S. had a similar program, PBS wouldn't have to prostitute itself to every corporate pimp with a dollar, and NPR could not only commission new works from deserving American composers, but the very show I work for, Fresh Air, would have enough money to pay me the high fees I so richly deserve. But I suppose the Republicans would screw this up the way they screw everything up, cutting off funds to stations that use foul language like "condom" or "breast" and declaring Rapture-oriented programming to be in the vital public interest.

But there's another aspect to the fee that I like less. I didn't know about it until a guy showed up at the door one day, showing identification from SFB, the local public station. I was puzzled. They owed me money for some work I'd done, but I didn't expect them to show up to pay me. It wasn't until he spoke that I realized what was up: "You have a television?" he asked. "A radio?" Uhhh, yes, I said. "Sign this." And there was a form that said, from that moment on, that I was registered with one radio and one TV at my house. The bills started coming immediately. Now, I'd been caught because I live on the ground floor, and the guy had seen the TV through my window. But they also patrol the streets with specially-outfitted vans, plainclothes, and scan people's apartments. Hmmm, two TVs playing in this place. Check the list: are they registered? And if not, they can fine you. I got off easily. (Worse, although I haven't seen this in Germany for what may be obvious reasons, but in other countries, they run ads on TV portraying people who aren't in compliance as criminals. I saw a Dutch ad one night where the cops came and took "Daddy" away while his kids watched, and the last shot was a tearful young boy asking "Why didn't he obey?" I asked my friends where the pot was, since I assumed this was a drug bust, but they told me it was just another heavy-handed pay your TV tax ad. Brutal!)

Anyway, I was caught, I wasn't hauled off, wasn't fined, and I paid the tax like a good German. But in the summer of 2003, not long after my financial catastrophe hit, my TV died. It was okay: I never used it to watch television. I've never been a big TV watcher, and I'd been renting videos and watching them on it. But one night as a friend and I were waiting for the commercials on a videotape to end the picture tube just winked out. Ah, well. Small loss.

But there was something I didn't know. Just as you have to register your devices (anmelden), you have to un-register (abmelden) them as well. And I didn't abmeld. And the fees just kept piling up. Now, paying these fees slipped right down to the bottom of my list of priorities: I didn't have the devices, and I didn't have the money. And I didn't know how to abmeld, either.

So I've been caught again. The dancer came over the other day, lured by my offering to buy her a bowl of ramen at the spiffy new totally authentic ramen and yakisoba joint, Makoto, over on Alte Schönhauser Str. 13 (not a paid commercial, but damn sure a recommendation), and helped me fill out an Abmeldungsformular and write a letter to the local TV authorities. Then, as we prepared to go out for some good hot soup, she helped me sneak the corpse of the TV out into the alley, where it vanished in a matter of hours.

When the tax lady came this morning, she was exasperated in a friendly way by my clueless-foreigner act (which is how they expect you to behave anyway), asked me some questions as she filled out a form ("Do you own a house?" she asked with a grin. "Do I have to tell you about my castle in the Loire Valley now?" I asked. "No, that's in France," she said and kept writing), and said (I think: she had a really, really thick Berlinisch accent, which can be impenetrable) that she'd see if there were some way I could pay off the €386.49 I owe twenty Euros at a time.

It could be worse. I once visited a couple in England the day they finally solved a huge problem with their cats, who'd not only been getting their asses kicked when they ventured outdoors, but were attracting other cats who'd come in the cat door, kick their asses some more, and then eat up all the cat-food. The guy in this couple, like me a total gadget-head, had found a door that worked in conjunction with radio-controllers mounted on cat collars. He'd spent quite a lot on it, took out the old cat-door, and installed the new one. The gal had gotten the collars on the cats, and so now it was time for a cup of tea and reading the manual.

"Oh, no," he wailed. "We've just bought two low-powered transmitters and have to add them to the telly fee!"

No cats, no television. No money, either, but that's only temporary.

HST

Boy, talk about having enough!

No, I didn't know him. I may have been introduced to him once; those days are a blur for a number of reasons. But a couple of people have asked for my take on him now, and I'll give it.

The arrival of Hunter Thompson at Rolling Stone came right about at my departure. Six months after the hiring spree which had included me, I think editor/publisher Jann Wenner was doing a number of things, most notably changing the magazine around and cutting back on stuff. One thing he cut back was Earth Times, an "ecology magazine" he'd started soon after we'd moved from above the print-shop at 746 Brannan and into our new office building at 635 3rd St. Jon Carroll had been overseeing it, and he was now back on the Rolling Stone side of things, but people were still getting fired. Rumors spread through the office, always a hotbed of gossip, and Jann saw fit to call a meeting in the reception area (the conference room wasn't finished yet). "I just want you to know that rumors here have gotten out of hand. Yes, we've had to make some changes here, but no, there will be no more people let off."

Twenty-four hours later, Carroll was fired.

Jon Landau came in from Boston and hunkered in Wenner's palatial office with him for a couple of days. The rumor mill said he was after my job, which would explain why he told me he was going to have it. John Burks, our mainstay managing editor, was fired, a terrible blow to morale. I was 21 years old, and had no idea what was happening, or what I'd do. To put it mildly, I was scared, but the magazine still had to come out. Wenner was on a tear, impossible to talk to, secretive and barricaded in his office.

One day I remember he'd gone into the (finally finished) conference room to interview someone. Who was it? Some weird guy with a Beatle wig, they said. Scary guy. He'd left strict orders that he wasn't to be disturbed, but at some point I had something he absolutely had to have, so I asked his secretary, Gretchen Horton, what to do. "Take it in there," she advised. "It'll be okay." So I knocked on the door, opened it when I heard Wenner bark "What?" and handed him the copy. Sure enough, there was a guy smoking cigarettes through an FDR-like cigarette holder, hair looking weird (the wig had come askew), wearing blue-tinted glasses. I handed Jann the stuff, he thanked me, and I left.

This isn't the time or place to tell the now-famous story of my firing, but it happened very shortly afterwards, and I had a pretty hard nervous breakdown, which I tended at some friends' farm in Elmira, Oregon. A strange artist known as Mr. Peanut showed up at one point, a guy who was living with a friend of mine in L.A., and I caught a ride back down to San Francisco with him. At loose ends, I got pretty paranoid, and developed a strong hatred for Rolling Stone and everything associated with it.

That's why, when they began serializing Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, I pretty much ignored it. Not that I was unaware of Thompson's work: I'd read him in Ramparts and its successor/competitor Scanlan's, and I'd also read Hell's Angels when I was still in college. The straight journalism pieces he did I rather admired, because it was of the same first-person, edgy style and voice that I, along with dozens of others of my colleagues, was trying to evolve. (Someone mailed me an early piece of mine from Creem last year, and I cringed when I read it; I wasn't imitating Thompson, but I was imitating myself). I thought Fear and Loathing was awful, self-indulgent twaddle (and boy, having committed enough of it myself, I thought I knew from twaddle), and I was pissed off that Jann's pursuit of celebrities had resulted in his giving Thompson the licence to waste space with it in the magazine.

I still have no desire to read it, and I loathed the film they made of it, but once Thompson started covering the Presidential election in 1972, I enjoyed reading his dispatches. But there was no doubt about it: he was getting weirder. Particularly after the articles were collated into a book and he retreated to Aspen and ran for sheriff, I began to get tired of him.

So, I suspect, did he. Certainly he did over the next decade. He became a cartoon character in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury. Interestingly, the Doonesbury home page today has this HST quote: "A lot of people want to grow up to be firemen and President. But nobody wants to grow up to be a cartoon character." Trudeau has often said that Uncle Duke wasn't literally Thompson, and I'm sure Thompson knew it, but as Thompson's writing came harder, he hit the lecture trail and, well, acted like a cartoon character. He'd take the podium with a bottle of Wild Turkey in his hand and rant and rave about whatever came to mind, collect his fee, and split. He'd be swarmed by admirers, usually young men with nascent substance-abuse problems and literary/journalistic aspirations, and hang out with them -- or not -- and eventually go on to the next gig. I felt embarrassed for him, because I thought he could probably still do good work if he could bat the demons, and the preppie leeches, back.

I also had cause to think about this because I'd been good friends with Lester Bangs, whose legend is similar to, but somewhat different than Thompson's. I recently read John Morthland's fine collection of Lester's work, Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste and was amazed at how much passion was in Lester's writing, and how much thought he put into what masqueraded as spontaneous composition. Had Lester lived another ten or twenty years, he might well have found himself a celebrity, and although writer's block had never been a problem of his (or mine, for that matter), he could be pretty easily seduced into partying. Would he have wound up a caricature of himself?

Would Thompson ever find the thread again? I wondered from time to time. Because what he suffered from was an addiction, the same one performers suffer from, the desire for adulation and exposure in a field where that mostly comes quietly and passively. It's easy enough to say he should have turned his back on it, but let's face it, most of us have never been in that position, and who's to judge just how easy that might have been?

I certainly know what it's like being depressed when you look at the ruins of your career, and wondering if it's possible to put it back together, and, if so, if it's worth it. Fortunately, I've never had a fascination with guns, or with living in solitude, or with chemically enhancing myself past the boundaries of good sense, although I understand its attraction. So perhaps I have an insight into what happened there the other day.

Or not. Frankly, in the end it's not as important as the work he left, and it's none of my -- or your -- business. I hope he's found peace and that he's happy, and if his sad end serves as a sober-up call for some of the idiots who thought the liquor and the pills were what made the writing, then it's not entirely tragic.

What is tragic, though, is that if a similarly distinctive and unusual voice appeared on the scene today, the world of print would have no place for it. Long articles are long gone, replaced by bite-sized chunks for the ADD generation. Magazines don't take risks because they don't want to offend and lose advertisers, and anyway, they're making little enough money, so they depend on staff writers to do the whole book. Freelancers don't have a chance, even established ones. Nope, a Hunter Thompson today would be tempted to put the gun to his head before his name ever appeared in print. And that's a tragedy which needs attending to, I'd say.

February

I don't know about that T.S. Eliot guy, but for me, February has always been the cruellest month. Nor am I alone in making this observation: I tossed off the comment in an e-mail to a friend in the States and she wrote back that she'd already heard it twice that week, both times from writers. Maybe it's the unfairness of paying the same rent for 28 days that you pay for months where you get 30 or 31 days for your money or something.

Last Monday, I opened the roll-down shutters to a landscape of white and had a surge of good feeling. Finding that odd, I tried to figure it out (I was still half-asleep, after all) and the phrase "snow day" came into my head, a relic of childhood when too much snow would close the schools. This was probably due to having been in touch with my sister about the death of the last of our aunts the week before, but it didn't take long for the feeling to go away. It was gone before I'd finished my coffee, in fact.

February in Berlin seems endless, and this is odd. After all, scientists say that Seasonal Affect Disorder is linked to photo-period, the amount of daylight in a given 24-hour period, and yet in December, when it started getting dark at around 3:35, I was still in a pretty good mood most of the time. It may have been dark a lot, and it was certainly cold, but the mood wasn't oppressive. Even January seemed pretty okay.

February, though, isn't.

Nor is it just me: this is the time of year when people get really down. I check in with friends and find them weary and depressed. One friend has just suffered a serious meltdown, and a couple of others are missing in action. You get worried when stuff like that happens. You get worried about yourself: I found I was sleeping nine hours or more each night these past couple of weeks, which is one of the symptoms of actual clinical depression. Why get up?

I spent a lot of yesterday in transit or just walking around, due to a couple of things I had to do, and it came to me clearly, the source of the February malaise: I've had enough. It was right around freezing, the ground had patches of ice and snow, the wind blew so that there was no sense of warmth anywhere, my nose was running, and the sky was a dirty white color not unlike that of the snow. From time to time, some sort of moisture would blow in my face, and although it didn't stick on the ground, it was unwelcome.

"I've had enough." For me, right now, that means I've had enough cold, enough dull light, enough wind, enough crappy weather. What worries me is that some people just think they've had enough, period. There's a sense of needing to move on, of wanting stuff to happen that just doesn't seem to be happening, and just the same, you can't seem to make it happen.

I'm luckier than most. In a little over two weeks, I'll be headed to Texas for a couple of weeks, participating in South By Southwest in Austin, where at the best it'll be sunny and warm and at worst humid and thundery. A nice break, because when I get back it'll still be February here, the superficial name-change to March notwithstanding. Not so for most folks here, though. And I've got to say, just taking possession of the documents for my plane ticket, my hotel reservation, my registration for the conference, has energized me, given me something to hang on to as these days of February grind on. Because make no mistake about it: it's not the photo-period at all. The days have gotten longer; it doesn't get dark until 5-ish these days.

That doesn't make it any better. Just longer.

Berlin is at the same latitude, I once figured out, as Edmonton, Alberta. (For comparison, New York is a little bit south of Barcelona). No wonder people here will gather at outdoor cafes, still wearing thick coats, as soon as the sunshine gets a bit more prevalent around the end of March. No wonder you can't open a film here in the summertime: nobody will go see it, because they'd rather be outdoors as long as they can. This is what the concept of the beer garden is all about.

This all seems unimaginably far in the future. It feels that way every year. Right now, yeah, I've had enough. But very fortunately, enough is not yet too much. In a week, February will be wearing its March name. I'll be counting the days until I get on that plane.